Another Open Source Library.

Posted on April 6, 2010

I’m having a bit of a clear out, taking a look at some of the code I’ve written and I’ve been pushing some of the stuff I’m currently using up to GitHub under and Apache 2 licence. I’ve used things in Announce.ly, Sproozi and some other small projects and figure they may be useful to someone else. My only criteria has been to ask If I’m using it now in a project, if so I’m actively supporting it and I’ve started pushing that stuff to GitHub, everything else is dormant and I don’t want to release something I’m not actively supporting- it also occurs to me that if even I’m not using it, it can’t be all that worthwhile.

I’ve just pushed some code I’ve been testing for a few months in a couple of projects to GitHub. It’s an accounts package written for Spring, that ties my oAuth library and Twitter together with either Hibernate or Hbase as backend storage. In it’s simplest form when you login with twitter it creates you a new user and persists it and the oAuth access tokens you need to act on behalf of that user.

I’ll write some more about it, better documentation and probably throw a little more code up on GitHub over the course of the next couple of weeks as and when I get a chance.

EC2 Spot instances

Posted on December 14, 2009

The thing I really like about Amazon’s cloud stuff is they’re constantly undermining themselves with new innovations – spot instances are another great example. Taking the utility metaphor a step further you can now rent their services when nobody else is for cheaper, like buying electricity at night.

A lot of the tasks I’m envisioning for Sproozi aren’t really time dependent. While it’s important to show you a page in a timely manner, crawl and index a brand new website you add quickly and basically be interactive there is also a lot I have to do in the background. The huge and growing list of URLs people add all need to be re-crawled and re-indexed regularly is just one of many examples of processing vast amounts of data. These tasks are always running, always in the background.

Spot instances are a perfect fit – I can bid the price I want on extra capacity spin up some extra instances to join the cluster when they’re cheap. Over the next few weeks I’ll probably try to add some spot instances to my Hadoop dev cluster and see what happens.

Signups via twitter API

Posted on December 7, 2009

This is possibly big news, something I’ve hoped they would do for a long time and something Fred Wilson voiced his support for a few weeks ago: Creating user accounts via the twitter API.

Both the projects I’m working on full time could benefit from this. Sproozi of course because we could create user accounts for them and help users find interesting local people to follow. My oft promised side project which at it’s most basic level [the one I'll launch first] aims to make making announcements easier could benefit by making the signup process seamless – users wouldn’t have to already have to have a twitter account, they could create it all in one step with us.

That I think is what makes this such big news, sites that rely on users already having a twitter account to do something useful will be able to create that account as a seamless on site process. That will help drive users to the sites and drive users to twitter. Let’s hope they start rolling it out to other developers!

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There’s no money in it

Posted on December 5, 2009

I followed up with a few potential investors who’ve had my pitch for Sproozi today. It’s been a week or two since I heard from them and I honestly wasn’t surprised when they came back with a no. Not hearing anything doesn’t exactly show a great deal of excitement.

I’m an optimist though and on the bright side I haven’t had a conversation or a meeting that I haven’t benefited from.

With first VC I met I had a pretty friendly audience, I knew him already, and I got some really good advice about how aspects of the pitch, the business in general and some introductions. With another, less friendly, it was clear I hadn’t done my homework. In yet another I learned a bit more and took on board the suggestion that I get a core set of users together to beta test the project – that basically just launching it blind was probably not going to go anywhere.

The rest of my meetings and conversations have been just as good. In each one I’ve refined my pitch further had clearer and better prepared answers for questions but I think I may be making one mistake that is keeping me from getting funded- trying to0 soon.

I’m starting to think that, because I have to explain the idea. I really s to be able to just give someone a link they can click and play with. With a link and 10 minutes, countless objections can be overcome and services that sound similar dismissed – it also gives a pretty clear idea of exactly what the thing does. I can’t possibly manage that level of understanding in any pitch, no matter how long or how refined.

So what’s next? I’ve got a side project I keep hinting about that’s painfully close to ready to launch very soon and then I’m going to keep working on Sproozi, get it to the point where I can send that link, develop some feedback from users and get some interesting data – get it to the point where I’m talking about what we are doing, not what we want to do. I’m not put off, if anything I’m more focused on distilling Sproozi down to the minimum set of features I can launch with.

If you haven’t already, signup for the super-secret-pre-alpha on the Sproozi site and as soon as I get there, I’ll let you know.

Sproozi blog and pre-beta signup

Posted on November 19, 2009

Sproozi is getting closer to actually doing something that’s worth showing off. I’ve setup a blog for it at blog.sproozi.com where I’ll post development updates. I’ve also added beta pre-registration to the Sproozi site. We’re going to need testers as soon as it launches, so if you’d like to help out let me know over there.

Open Source for Business

Posted on June 8, 2009

I didn’t get this posted yesterday because the Internet crapped out in our area. Nothing but excuses, I know.

I’ve been working beyond the bleeding edge, using a version of the Nutch code that’s not even made it into the Apache SVN for the project yet. To celebrate the fact that my contributions will make it in I figure its a good time to get into open source and business.

To put it briefly, and as you can probably guess, I’m pro open source. I use it extensively and I push back as much as I can. When it comes to the most of the code I write there really isn’t much commercial benefit in keeping it hidden so it just makes sense to give back.

There are two types of business on the web, one where you provide a software service and that is the product and others where you provide access to data. It’s pretty easy to tell which camp you’re in.

37 Signals for example, they’re in the first and their software probably isn’t something they just want to let people download – unless they’re incredibly brave. Doing that would mean that they’d be competing on margins for the cheapest hosting, users would flock to the cheaper services, have a poor experience and blame the software.

Sproozi on the other hand is the second type, our data is what users mostly care about and we’re not planning to be precious about our code. I’ve already been pushing some of the changes I’ve made to Nutch back into the project and we’re planning open source projects of our own in the coming months.

One of our plans we have is to build iPhone, Andriod and other phone based applications for our service and release them as open source projects. We’re planning to write them (or have them written for us) and release ‘official’ versions. Then release that code as open source project to provide a framework for developers so that they can build great things from it and on our API.

If there are any experienced iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian or Pre developers out there that want to get involved, drop me a line were a ways off yet but would love to chat about it and get some very early feedback.

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A post a day for the month of June

Posted on June 1, 2009

Once upon a time I tried to set myself the goal of a post a day forever – it was hard and I failed almost immediately. Forever, it turns out, is a long time. Days, weeks or months later I look back and think, this was supposed to be the future; Where are the flying cars, the robots, my posts?

So I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to write something here every day for the whole of June. I’m going to try to avoid writing the posts all in a day and scheduling them, because that’s not writing something here everyday.

I’ve just been to BarCamp Leeds 2009, sproozi is coming along well, we’re re-launching GoRoam to focus more on consulting work we do and want to get more involved with, I’m getting involved setting up some coworking, open coffees and other things to try to get more involved and collaborate more with the local entrepreneurs and the digital community in Hebden Bridge; so really there isn’t any excuse, I have enough to say to easily fill 30 days.

So, a post a day for the month of June – Day 1.